69 Barrow Street

by Lawrence Block

  She giggled again. Oh, this was fun! Why, she was having a marvelous time.

  “Mummy? Are you going to punish me, Mummy?”

  Silence. Why, how nice it was of Mummy not to interrupt her. But Mummy wasn’t answering her questions, and that wasn’t especially nice. Why, it wasn’t even polite, and Mummy always told her how important it was to be polite and answer when somebody asked you a question.

  Maria let her hands wander over Stella’s body. Mummy certainly had a lovely figure, that was for sure. Her breasts were especially nice, and Maria stroked and caressed and kissed her breasts over and over, hoping that her Mummy would enjoy what she was doing to her and what she was going to do. She took the nipples of Stella’s breasts in her mouth one at a time and sucked them like a little baby girl until they grew hard and rigid.

  Maria giggled.

  “Mummy,” she said softly.

  Silence.

  “I hate you, Mummy.”

  Why, what a horrid thing for her to say. That wasn’t nice at all, and now Mummy would punish her for saying that. She was supposed to love her Mummy, wasn’t she?

  “I hate you, Mummy.”

  Now why did she have to go and say it again? It wasn’t nice at all, and she certainly didn’t want Mummy to punish her again. Mummy punished so hard and hurt her so much.

  “Mummy,” she said a third time, “I hate you.”

  And she giggled again.

  Then she picked up the straight razor. She opened it and held it up to the light so that she could see it very clearly. The metal reflected the light and was very shiny, and the edge was very sharp.

  Maria bent over again and kissed each of her Mummy’s nipples in turn.

  And then she cut each of them off with the razor.

  Ralph sensed something was wrong the minute he saw Susan’s door open. He rushed into the room. She was lying on the floor naked, her chest heaving and a cold sweat covering her forehead. He knelt down beside her and took her in his arms and she grabbed him as if she were drowning.

  “Darling! What’s the matter?”

  For a few moments she couldn’t answer. All she could do was remain in his arms and tell him how much she loved him. He held onto her and stroked her like a little kitten until finally her breathing went down to normal and she could speak again.

  Then she told him.

  She told him first how she had gone to see Stella the afternoon before. She told him the whole scene that had taken place between the two of them, with Stella trying to make love to her and attempting at last to rape her until she finally knocked her out and escaped.

  Then he interrupted her.

  “Baby,” he said, “why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean—”

  “I suppose I was a little bit ashamed of myself, Ralph.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You don’t have to be ashamed of anything, darling.”

  She kissed him and continued, telling him this time about the scene with Stella that had just taken place. His eyes went wide as she recounted what the woman had done, and several times he was at the point of interrupting her, but he let her finish.

  “I knew she was sick,” he said slowly after she had finished.

  “Very sick, Ralph.”

  “Sicker than I realized. My God, she almost killed you!”

  She nodded.

  “What an awful woman,” he said. “To think I was actually living with her.”

  “The painting’s completely ruined, Ralph.”

  “To hell with the painting.”

  “But—”

  “I could paint it again blindfolded. It’s you that I’m worried about. She might try something like that again and there won’t be a painting for her to slash up by mistake.”

  “I don’t know she will. She thinks she killed me.”

  He shook his head. “I better call the police,” he said. “She ought to be put away.”

  He started to stand up.

  “Wait, Ralph.”

  He turned and looked at her.

  “The police can wait.”

  “But—”

  “Let them wait, darling. There’s something I want you to do for me first.”

  “Anything.”

  She stood up and came into his arms. She was still trembling slightly, but her trembling was not from fear this time.

  “I want you to make love to me, Ralph. All the way.”

  He took off his clothes again and put them on the chair. When he was naked and ready for her she was already lying on the bed. He lay down beside her and took her in his arms, kissing her.

  She was not afraid.

  He kissed and stroked every square inch of her body. He touched her and kissed her and caressed her until she turned into a woman on fire with love, a thing of passion writhing on the bed beside him.

  She was not afraid.

  And then he took her. He took her slowly, gently, and at first it hurt but a second later she didn’t notice the pain at all because it was all so good and so beautiful, all so perfect and so wonderful, all so absolutely excellent and so unlike the way she had imagined it.

  Their bodies moved together. She was on a gigantic seesaw going up and down, up and down, up and down, and she thought that it would never end because it kept getting better and better and she was going wild, wild, and it was so good, so unbelievably good.

  And then it was over. Their bodies melted apart and she knew a peace that she hadn’t believed existed. She laughed and then she cried and then they were both very still.

  He looked at her and she knew the question he wanted to ask.

  She said: “It was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me.”

  And it was.

  They were silent.

  And then she said: “Ralph?”

  “What is it, darling?”

  “Could you… I feel like a wanton.”

  “What is it?”

  “Could you…make it happen again?”

  When the police came to the first-floor apartment at 69 Barrow Street they found a little brunette sitting on the floor in the bedroom with a razor in her hand. She was giggling hysterically to herself and mumbling baby talk.

  What they found on the bed caused one of them to be thoroughly sick in the bathroom.

  Another group of men came and took Maria to the hospital for the criminally insane. She became very well known there as the little girl who stole a bottle of rubbing alcohol from the dispensary and poured it into her vagina as penance for what she had done to her Mummy.

  Still another crew of men shoveled what was left of Stella into a box. They took the box to the morgue and it stayed there for a few days. Then some other men took it away and buried it.

  Ralph and Susan didn’t remain at 69 Barrow Street. Too many things had happened there that both of them wanted to forget. Besides, the Village represented a way of life that each of them had no desire to stick with.

  They moved to an apartment on 94th Street near Riverside Drive. It wasn’t long before Ralph landed a good job doing covers for a paperback book outfit. It wasn’t too much longer before they had their first child, a boy.

  But the Village remained and it will remain forever. Stella and Maria and Ralph and Susan have left it, but the other Sick Ones will be there forever. Luke and Betty Swinnerton will stick needles of heroin into their arms until they pop their way to hell. The others will smoke marijuana and drink too much and sleep with whoever asks them until they rot and die.

  The Village endures.

  A New Afterword by the Author

  AH YES. Barrow Street.

  I was born in Buffalo, at the other end of the state, and my first visit to New York City came ten and a half years later, in December of 1948. My father and I rode the Empire State Limited to Grand Central and stayed for three or four nights at the Hotel Commodore, right next door to the train
station. We found time to visit an aunt and uncle of his, but most of the weekend was devoted to showing me New York, and we didn’t miss much. We rode the Third Avenue el down to the Bowery, where I saw a man emerge from a saloon, scream at the top of his lungs, then turn around and go back in again. We rode the ferry to Bedloes Island—since renamed Liberty Island—and saw the statue. We went to the top of the Empire State Building. We saw a Broadway show—Where’s Charley? with Ray Bolger—and the live telecast of Toast of the Town, which was what Ed Sullivan’s show was called back in the day. (At the time, I’d not yet seen a TV set; I found the monitor more fascinating than what was occurring onstage.)

  I must have known then that I’d wind up in New York.

  There was another visit a couple of years later, with my mother and sister along this time, and all four of us stayed at the Commodore. We Saw South Pacific this time. I don’t remember where else we went, or what else we did, but one place I’m sure we didn’t get was Greenwich Village. I never got to the Village until the summer of 1956, when I lived there.

  I went to Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. There were a lot of things that set the school apart, but its defining element was a program of cooperative education. Students spent half the year on campus, the other half out in the world, acquiring vocational and life experience in an appropriate short–term job. Like many of my classmates, I spent my whole freshman year in Yellow Springs, and in August of 1956 I went off to New York to begin my first co–op job, as a mail boy at Pines Publications. I got there as I’d done the first time, on the Empire State Limited, and met Paul Grillo right there in the terminal, in front of the big clock. He’d been my hall advisor during the academic year, and now we’d be rooming together. He’d already found us a place, and told me how to get there—147 West Fourteenth Street, and I was to take the shuttle to Times Square and the IRT downtown to Fourteenth Street.

  That first night, I went out exploring, and I managed to find my way to a jazz club that had come well recommended by my roommate, Steve Schwerner. It was the Café Bohemia, at 15 Barrow Street, and I stood at the bar and had a drink and listened to Al Cohn and Zoot Sims.

  I explored some more over the weekend. A fellow I’d met a summer earlier when we’d both worked at Camp Lakeland lived on Bleecker Street, and introduced me to Caricatures, a coffee house on Macdougal with a batch of caricatures in the window, alone with a signed note from Maxwell Bodenheim, the archetypical Village bohemian who’d been murdered a few years earlier. The place was owned and run by a woman named Liz, who was more interested in her ongoing bridge game in the back room than in the customers out front. But she did serve cheeseburgers on toasted rye bread, and they were outstanding.

  Monday morning I reported to work at Pines Publications. And by the beginning of September Paul Grillo and I, along with Fred Anliot, had moved south to 108 West Twelfth Street, and south and west to 54 Barrow Street.

  Where I spent the months of September and October, until it was time to return to Yellow Springs.

  That was a wonderful apartment, parlor floor front, the living room fronting on Barrow Street, a bedroom at the rear, a kitchen–dining room in between. I wrote a story there called “You Can’t Lose,” and it eventually became my first sale when Manhunt bought it a year later. I got friendly with the folk music enthusiasts who spent Sunday afternoons around the circle in Washington Square, and when the cops cleared the area at six o’clock, the party would move on to our place on Barrow Street.

  When October ended and it was time to return to Yellow Springs, we passed the apartment to a couple of other Antiochians, and they kept it for the next three months. It may have stayed in Antioch hands for another semester, or maybe not, but eventually it went back to the landlord. Now I suppose it’s a co–op, or a condo; if it’s still a rental, it probably runs to $2500 a month. We paid $90, split three ways. Then again, I was earning $40 a week at Pines Publications, and taking home $34. All things in proportion.

  It was two summers later, in August of 1958, that Sheldon Lord wrote his first novel. The book was called Carla, and was both set and written in Buffalo. I’d dropped out of Antioch after my second year, when I’d lucked into a job as an editor at a literary agency. I kept that job for the better part of a year, then went home to Buffalo and wrote a novel (Strange Are the Ways of Love, by Lesley Evans), and got an assignment from my former employer to write an erotic novel for a new publisher, Midwood Tower Books, the creation of one Harry Shorten. I wrote the book, Harry loved it, and Sheldon Lord was in business.

  Sheldon Lord’s second book was A Strange Kind of Love, and it seems to me 69 Barrow Street was third, but I may be wrong about that. I was back in Yellow Springs when I wrote A Strange Kind of Love, and I wrote Born to Be Bad there as well, and it seems to me 69 Barrow Street came between the two.

  But who cares?

  I liked the idea of a book set in a single building, and telling the stories of its various inhabitants. And I wanted to use the Village in a book, and what better street than Barrow Street? Harold Robbins, who’d written a terrific realistic novel in A Stone for Danny Fisher, had followed it with some less terrific but soundly commercial books, and one of them was indeed set in a single building, and the title was 79 Park Avenue. Why not improve in that a wee bit by reducing the number by ten? Call the book 69 Barrow Street—an address which doesn’t actually exist, incidentally, so don’t go looking for it—and I’d give the book a clearly sexual tag while doing absolutely nothing censorable, Hey, it’s an address, it’s a fucking number, and what the matter with that?

  It was such a brilliant idea that I wondered how come Harold Robbins hadn’t thought of it first. And, years later, I found out that he had. It had been his original intention to call his book 69 Park Avenue, and that was the title he’d attached to the manuscript when he sent it to his publisher.

  But cooler heads prevailed.

  As they sometimes do. Fortunately there were no cooler heads in Harry Shorten’s offices, and my title stayed.

  Ages and ages ago, that was. I don’t know that I expected to be around so many years later, but I’ll tell you this: I never thought for a moment that Sheldon Lord would still be with us, or that anyone on earth would actually be reading 69 Barrow Street in a year starting with a 2. I’m damn glad that I’m still around, and, yes, glad to say the same for Sheldon Lord, and this creation of his.

  Hope you enjoyed it.

  A Biography of Lawrence Block

  Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.

  Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.

  Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in Manhunt, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and the New York Times. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleve
n collections including Enough Rope (2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.

  In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in No Score, Chip Harrison Scores Again, Make Out with Murder, and The Topless Tulip Caper. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.

  A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.

  A four-year-old Block in 1942.

  Block during the summer of 1944, with his baby sister, Betsy.

  Block’s 1955 yearbook picture from Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York.

  Block in 1983, in a cap and leather jacket. Block says that he “later lost the cap, and some son of a bitch stole the jacket. Don’t even ask about the hair.”

  Block with his eldest daughter, Amy, at her wedding in October 1984.

  Seen here around 1990, Block works in his office on New York’s West 13th Street with, he says, “a bad haircut, an ugly shirt, and a few extra pounds.”

  Block at a bookstore appearance in support of A Walk Among the Tombstones, his tenth Matthew Scudder novel, on Veterans Day, 1992.